Mailinglist Archive: opensuse (4570 mails)

[Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>]

On Mon, 28 Nov 2005 23:49:09 -0500
"B. Stia" <usr@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:

> Hello SuSE people.
> 
> Question: Am running an AMD 64 processor. There are still not all 
> programs that are 64 bit.  I know that the system will handle 32 bit 
> stuff but I was wondering if an src file can be compiled to 64 bit.
By default, if you are running on a 64-bit system with a 64-bit OS the
compiler default should be 64-bits. The file command should tell you if
a binary is 32-bit or 64-bit. 
One of the problems that developers have is that most 32-bit apps work
fine on 64-bit systems, so there is not much incentive to provide both
a 32-bit and 64-bit version. And, there is no guarantee that the 64-bit
version will be faster. 

BTW: I've been working 64-bits since about 1994 on the Alpha. One
problem we had with the Alpha was that we had fx32 which allowed us to
run 32-bit Windows apps on the 64-bit Alpha running NT. The idea was to
ease the transition, but it also provided no incentive for developers
to create native 64-bit Alpha code. I think that the transition to
64-bits in Linux space will be a bit slow, but as Intel and AMD stop
making the 32-bit chips, there will be some steady progress. 
-- 
Jerry Feldman <gaf@xxxxxxx>
Boston Linux and Unix user group
http://www.blu.org PGP key id:C5061EA9
PGP Key fingerprint:053C 73EC 3AC1 5C44 3E14 9245 FB00 3ED5 C506 1EA9